Stealing First Base

Inspired by the true story of the largest sports memorabilia fraud in American history.

Between 1997 and 2005, an FBI investigation called Operation Bullpen tore the lid off a national racket and produced more than sixty convictions. By the Bureau's own estimate, most of the autographed baseballs that changed hands in those years, balls signed by Ruth, by Mantle, by Williams, were fakes. Stealing First Base is the novel that finally puts a family at the center of that crime.

It begins in 1920, on a train platform in southern Italy, where a nineteen-year-old porter named Russo Massena throws one punch too many and has to run. He runs all the way to America, all the way to Yankee Stadium, carrying nothing but a love of a game he has never seen played. That love becomes an inheritance, passing down through three more generations until it arrives, warped almost beyond recognition, in the hands of his grandson.

Gavin Messina was supposed to hit home runs for the Yankees. Instead he turns out to have the coldest nerve and the most relentless organizing mind in the business. From a warehouse outside Bakersfield he builds the most prolific signature-forgery operation in the country, aging paper in shellac baths and sealed bags of dog food. But the hand at the center of that machine belongs to Gregory Marino, the quiet prodigy Gavin first handed a pen and a shoebox of signatures at a Long Island kitchen table, telling him to try the Mantle. Gregory grows into the finest forger in the country, mixing his own iron gall ink and signing dead legends back to life one ball at a time.

What they do not know is that one of their best customers is a fictitious Japanese trading company, and that every transaction is being recorded by federal agents who are running out of patience fast.

Moving from a Pullman card game in 1952 to a Las Vegas card show to a federal courtroom in San Diego, Stealing First Base is a sweeping, warmhearted, slyly funny saga about fathers and sons, faith and fakery, and the specific American sadness that arrives when love and ambition meet in the wrong kind of room. The characters are invented. The crimes are not.